


For In That Sleep of Death

by hickorysleeve



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Consent Issues, Gen, Headcanon, Homophobia, Pre-The Dream Thieves, The Dream Thieves Spoilers, Underage Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 11:36:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6237058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hickorysleeve/pseuds/hickorysleeve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are sixteen years old and laying on your best friend’s floor while he sleeps in the bed.  This is not a new arrangement.  You have been doing this for two years.  Still, you lay on the floor of his bedroom and stare at the ceiling, listening to him breathing, listening to yourself breathe.</p>
<p>You wonder what it means to be in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For In That Sleep of Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eudaimon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/gifts).



1.  
You are thirteen and tall for your age, accent finally subverted into your chest after years of practice, when your family moves from New Jersey to Virginia. Your mother still speaks Bulgarian at home, a mess of syllables and letters you have known all your life, and you respond in kind, but it is increasingly in English, increasingly with swearing, increasingly with rebellion. Even if you wanted to get out of New Jersey and away from your father, this isn’t what you wanted at all.

The only benefit is a small copse of boys, all younger than you but within a few months your age, all of them from immigrant families as well. Most of them are Virginia transplants, like you, though the nearest—a blond Nordic boy, Matthis Skov—came from the Maryland side of DC originally. The furthest came further than you did; Illya Prokopenko’s family is Ukranian, and he is a homely child, shorter than the other boys but their leader. He scrutinizes with sharp eyes and wing-nut ears.

“Russian?” he asks.

“Bulgarian,” you tell him with a derisive sneer. Illya sneers right back.

2.  
You are fourteen and none of you can legally drive, but you have dreamed yourself a perfect Virginia license forgery that says you are seventeen, and you have a face that can pull that off, most days.

It is a tight squeeze to fit Matthis Skov, William Jiang, Jonah Swan, Illya Prokopenko and yourself into a Mitsubishi Evolution Lancer, especially when Matthis and Jonah are almost as tall as you, and when Illya demands to take shotgun no matter what the situation is.

“Your tunes fuckin’ suck, Kavinsky,” he gripes, but there is a smile in his eyes. He puts on something with a throbbing baseline that sounds like it belongs in a nightclub you have never been to, something with a woman’s whispering moan behind the treble. You drive them out to the mountains, out to the dirt farm tracks, out to the old half-abandoned coal mine fields.

You smoke weed—all except Jonah, who’s look out for cops, who drinks a beer that makes his mouth pucker like he’s sucked on a lemon; “This tastes like shit,” he says, but keeps drinking anyway—and teach them how to shotgun.

“Isn’t that a little gay?” William says with a derisive noise in the back of his nose. The back of your neck is defensively hot. The others laugh. Illya flips them off.

“Fuck off, shit crust.” He’s the first one to try a shotgun back at you. His lips are chapped and dry and he is imperfect. He is perfect. He is perfect.

3.  
Skov is fucking in the backseat of your Evo, the girl he’s with high on something you dreamed up, and Illya is doing a line of cocaine off the dash. You did one earlier. Your eyes are wide, staring straight ahead as you drive. It’s just the three of you and the girl. You have the music turned up loud, trying to drown her out, even though Illya turns it down occasionally, turning back to look at her.

Sometimes, you look over at him. You wonder what would happen if you pulled over and parked. You are fifteen and he is fifteen and there are drugs in his system that make him more susceptible to that sort of thing.

Illya starts to climb into the back seat while you’re driving.

“Illya,” you protest, at the same time as Skov says, “Proko, what the fuck, man. Get your own.”

You can hear clothes being pushed around. You can hear Illya pushing his clothes around. The girl makes a noise and in the rear view mirror, you see Illya moan against her shoulder and you think about how close your friends’ bodies are and your cock is hard in your jeans.

You slam on the breaks. Illya laughs and swears.

“Get the fuck out of my car,” you hiss. They all start piling out. “Not you, Illya.”

You at least let Skov and his girl get their clothes on before you speed away. Illya leans out the window and flips them off, laughing triumphantly. You grab him by the back of his pants and haul him back in, and he turns, kissing your cheek.

You’ve never been kissed like that before.

4.  
You are sixteen years old and laying on your best friend’s floor while he sleeps in the bed. This is not a new arrangement. You have been doing this for two years. Still, you lay on the floor of his bedroom and stare at the ceiling, listening to him breathing, listening to yourself breathe.

You wonder what it means to be in love. Were your parents in love? You don’t know. Your mother used to care about you, you know, when you were young, otherwise she wouldn’t have left New Jersey when things got so bad, even though you’d already dealt with the problem yourself. You think, though, that the all-consuming need to be around him at all times, the want to show him your whole self, the trust you have in him—you think that that is love.

“Illya?”

He sleeps, mumbles something softly as he rolls over in his bed. It’s a big one, and you don’t know why you have to sleep on the floor when you stay over.

Slowly, you leverage onto your knees, resting your head on the edge of the bed. It is a balmy spring and Illya sleeps with no shirt and his spine is a line of knobby notches that you know your fingers would fit between because you have put your knuckles between them, punched him there, grappled with him like a fiend like you’ve grappled with Skov and Swan and Jiang.

“Illya…?”

He rolls over onto his other side and you crawl up onto the bed, under the blanket with him. His eyes slide open, sleepy and blurred and momentarily confused that you are there in his bed. You stare at him and him at you for a long, breathless moment, and you touch his hair.

“Yosef, go back to sleep,” he says, all sleepy mumble. He grabs your fingers. You push back.

The kiss is imperfect. He is imperfect. He is perfect. He is perfect.

He roars awake.

“What the _fuck_ , Kavinsky?” You try to quiet him, try to get him to shut up, in case he wakes up his parents, in case they come to see why he’s yelling. “Did you just—what the _fuck_ , you some sort of fucking _faggot_ , or something?!”

“Illya, I—”

“Jesus Christ—Jesus _Christ_ , you’ve seen my fucking dick. What the fuck. What the _fuck_.”

“I’m sorry, Illya, I didn’t—”

Beside Illya’s bed is a baseball bat. You are on the floor, and he is looking at it. He is looking at it and looking at you, but you are closer to the bat than he is.

5.  
You are sixteen and dreaming.

It is a balmy spring day and you are in your own bed, and Illya Prokopenko is in it with you. He is imperfect. He is shorter than you, has always been, with his wing-nut ears and stooped shoulders and Ukrainian accent eking into every word he says; he never learned to subvert the accent like you did. He is lying in your bed in your house, looking at you with smart, dark eyes. You know everything there is to know about this boy, because he trusts you. You are his confidant.

But he could never be yours, except here.

You are sixteen and dreaming of a boy who could never be yours, a boy whose body is lifeless in a car you will have to destroy and dream anew. But right now. Right now, the boy is more important.

He seems to know. But this is your dream. And in your dream, Illya loves you, even if he could never be yours.

“When we wake up,” you tell him, “you won’t know about this.”

He nods.

You, sixteen and dreaming, kiss him. It is more like breathing life.

And then, you wake up.


End file.
